Horrible Imaginings

by Fritz Leiber

  At this moment he would make a supreme effort to lift his head, reckless of heart attack, fighting for each fraction of an inch of upward movement, and find himself grinding his forehead and nose into a rough gritty wooden surface that had been there, not three inches above him, all the while, like the lid of a shallow coffin.

  Then, and only then, in that moment of intensest horror, he’d wake at last, stretched out tidily in his own bed, gasping just a little, and with a totally unjoyous hard-on that seemed more like the symptom of some mortal disease than any prelude to pleasure.

  The reader may at this point object that by entering Ramsey’s bedroom we have strayed beyond the apartment-tree limits set for the actions of this story. Not so, for we have been examining only his memories of his nightmares, which never have the force of the real thing. In this fashion we peered into his dream, perhaps into his bedroom, but we never turned on the light. The same applies to his thoughts about and reactions to those erections which troubled his nightmare wakings and which seemed to him so much more like tumorous morbid growths—almost, cancers—than any swellings of joy.

  Now Ramsey was sufficiently sophisticated to wonder whether his nightmares were an expression, albeit an unusual and most unpleasant one, of a gathering sexual arousal in himself, which his invariable waking hard-ons would seem to indicate, and whether the discharge of that growing sexual pressure would not result in the nightmares ceasing or at least becoming fewer in number and of a lesser intensity. On the one hand, his living alone was very thoroughgoing; he had formed no new intimacies since his wife’s death five years earlier and his coincidental retirement and moving here. On the other, he had a deep personal prejudice against masturbation, not on moral or religious grounds, but from the conviction that such acts demanded a living accomplice or companion to make them effectively real, no matter how distant and tenuous the relation between the two parties, an adventuring-out into the real world and some achievement there, however slight.

  Undoubtedly there were guilty shadows here—his life went back far enough for him to have absorbed in childhood mistaken notions of the unhealthiness of auto-eroticism that still influenced his feelings if not his intellect. And also something of the work-ethic of Protestantism, whereby everything had its price, had to be worked and sweated and suffered for.

  With perhaps—who knows?—a touch of the romantic feeling that sex wasn’t worth it without the spice of danger, which also required a venturing out beyond one’s private self.

  Now on the last occasion—about eight months ago—when Ramsey had noted signs of growing sexual tension in himself (signs far less grotesquely inappropriate, frightening, oppressive, and depressing than his current nightmares—which appeared to end with a strong hint of premature burial), he had set his imagination in a direction leading toward that tension’s relief by venturing some four blocks into the outer world (the world beyond the apartment tree’s street door) to a small theater called Ultrabooth, where for a modest price (in these inflated times) he could make contact with three living girls (albeit a voiceless one through heavy one-way glass), who would strip and display themselves intimately to him in a way calculated to promote arousal.

  (A pause to note we’ve once more gone outside the apartment tree, but only by way of a remembered venturing—and memory is less real even than dream, as we have seen.)

  The reason Ramsey had not at once again had recourse to these young ladies as soon as his nightmares began with their telltale terminal hard-ons, providing evidence of growing sexual pressure even if the peculiar nightmare contents did not, was that he had found their original performance, though sufficient for his purpose as it turned out, rather morally troubling and aesthetically unsatisfying in some respects and giving rise to various sad and wistful reflections in his mind as he repeated their performance in memory.

  Ducking through a small, brightly lit marquee into the dim lobby of Ultrabooth, he’d laid a $10 bill on the counter before the bearded young man without looking at him, taken up the $2 returned with the considerate explanation that this was a reduction for senior citizens, and joined the half-dozen or so silent waiting men who mostly edged about restlessly yet slowly, not looking at each other.

  After a moderate wait and some small augmentation of their number, there came a stirring from beyond the red velvet ropes as the previous audience was guided out a separate exit door. Ryker gravitated forward with the rest of the new audience. After a two-minute pause, a section of red rope was hooked aside, and they surged gently ahead into a shallow inner foyer from which two narrow dark doorways about fifteen feet apart led onward.

  Ryker was the fourth man through the left-hand doorway. He found himself in a dim, curving corridor. On his left, wall. On his right, heavy curtains partly drawn aside from what looked like large closets, each with a gloomy window at the back. He entered the first that was unoccupied (the second), fumbled the curtains shut behind him, and clumsily seated himself facing the window on the cubicle’s sole piece of furniture, a rather low barstool.

  Actually his booth wasn’t crampingly small. Ryker estimated its floor space as at least one half that of the apartment tree’s elevator, which had a six-person capacity.

  As his eyes became accommodated to the darkness of his booth and the dimness of the sizable room beyond, he saw that the latter was roughly circular and walled by rectangular mirrors, each of which, he realized, must be the window of a booth such as his own—except one window space was just a narrow curtain going to the floor. A wailing bluesy jazz from an unseen speaker gently filled his ears, very muted.

  The windows were framed with rows of frosted light bulbs barely turned on—must have them on a rheostat, he thought. The floor was palely and thickly carpeted, and there were a few big pale pillows set about. From the ceiling hung four velvet-covered ropes thinner than those in the lobby. Each ended in a padded leather cuff. He also noted uneasily two velvet-covered paddles, no larger than Ping-Pong ones, lying on one of the big pillows. The dimness made everything seem grimy, as though fine soot were falling continuously from the ceiling like snow.

  He sensed a stirring in the other booths, and he saw that a girl had entered the room of mirrors while he’d been intent on the paddles. At first he couldn’t tell whether she was naked or not, but then as she slowly walked out, hardly glancing at the mirrors, face straight ahead like a sleepwalker’s, the music began to come up and the lights too, brighter and brighter. He saw she was a blonde, age anywhere from nineteen to twenty-nine—how could you know for sure? He hoped nineteen. And she was wearing a net brassiere bordered by what looked like strips of white rabbit’s fur. A tiny apron of the same kind of fur hung down over her crotch, attached to some sort of G-string, and she wore short white rabbit’s fur boots.

  She yawned and stretched, looked around, and then swiftly removed these items of apparel, but instead of letting them fall or laying them down on one of the pillows, she carried them over to the curtained doorway which interrupted the wall of mirrors and handed them through to someone. They were taking no chances on the fur getting dirty—how many performances a day was it the girls gave? He also realized that the right- and left-hand passages to the booths didn’t join behind, as he’d imagined at first—there had to be an entry passage for the performer. Good thing he hadn’t tried go all the way around and check on all the booths before picking one—and maybe lost his.

  The vertical slit in the curtain widened, and the now naked blonde was joined by a naked brunette of the same undetermined youth. They embraced tenderly yet perfunctorily, as if in a dream, swaying with the music’s wails, then leaned apart, brushing each other’s small breasts, fingers lingering at the erecting nipples, then trailing down to touch each other’s clefts. They separated then and began to work their way around the booths, facing each mirror in turn, swaying and writhing, bumping and grinding, arching back, bellying toward. The brunette was across from him, the blonde off to his left and coming closer. His mouth was dry, his
breaths came faster. He was getting a hard-on, he told himself, or about to. He was jealous about the time the blonde spent at each other window and yet somehow dreaded her coming.

  And then she was writhing in front of him, poker-faced, looking down toward him. Could she see him? Of course not!—he could see the windows across from him, and they just reflected his blank window. But suppose she bent down and pressed her face and flattening nose-tip against the glass, cupping her hands to either side to shut out light? Involuntarily he flinched backward, caught himself and almost as swiftly stretched his face forward to admire her breasts as she preened, trailing her fingers across them. Yes, yes, he thought desperately, dutifully, they were small, firm, not at all pendulous, big nippled with large aureoles, splendid, yes splendid, yes splendid...

  And then he was forcing his gaze to follow her hands down her slender waist past her belly button and pale pubic hair and stretch open the lips of her cleft.

  It was all so very confusing, those flaps and those ribbons of membrane, of glistening pinkish-red membrane. Really, a man’s genitals were much neater, more like a good and clear diagram, a much more sensible layout. And when you were young you were always in too much of a hurry to study the female ones, too damn excited, keyed up, overwhelmed by the importance of keeping a hard-on. That, and the stubborn old feeling that you mustn’t look, that was against the rules, this was dirty. With his wife he’d always done it in the dark, or almost. And now when you were old and your eyesight wasn’t so good anymore... One slender finger moved out from the bent stretching ones to point up, then down, to indicate clitoris and cunt. Whyn’t she point out her urethra too? It was somewhere there, in between. The clitoris was hard to make out in the midst of all that red squirming...

  And then without warning she had spun around, bent over, and was looking at him from between her spread legs, and her hand came back around her side to jab a finger twice at the shadowed sallow pucker of her anus, as if she were saying, “And here’s my asshole, see? My God, how long does it take you dumb bastards to get things straight?”

  Really, it was more like an anatomy lesson taught by a bored, clown-white cadaver than any sort of spicy erotic cocktail. Where was the faintest hint of the flirtatious teasing that in old times, Ryker recalled, gave such performances a point? Why, this girl had come in almost naked and divested herself of the scant remainder with all the romance of someone taking out dental plates before retiring. My God, was that how they got ready for the full act in private? Where was the slow unbuttoning, the sudden change of mind and buttoning up again? Where was the enthusiastic self-peek down her pulled-forward bodice followed by the smile and knowing wink that said, “Oh, boy, what I got down there! Don’t you wish... ?” Where was the teasing that overreached itself, the accidental exposure of a goody, pretended embarrassment, and the overhasty hiding of it, leading to further revelations, as one who covering her knees bares her rear end? Where the feigned innocence, prudish or naive? the sense of wicked play, precocious evil? Above all, where was the illusion that her body’s treasures were just that? her choicest possessions and her chiefest pride, secret ‘tween her and you, hoarded like miser’s gold, though shared out joyously and generously at the end?

  The girl, instead of graciously overhearing his racing thoughts (they must be audible!) and at least attempting to make some corrections for them in her behavior, last of all seized handholds at the corners of the window and set the soles of her feet against the sides and dangled there spread open and bent for a short while, rocking back and forth, like a poker-faced slender ape, so he could see it all at once after a fashion: asshole, cunt, and clitoris—and urethra—wherever that was.

  That was the show’s highpoint of excitement, or shock at any rate, for Ryker. Although a third girl appeared and the other two got her undressed and strung up by the padded straps on the velvet ropes, and did some things to her with their lips and tongues and the lightly brushing velvet paddles, that was the high point—or whatever.

  Afterward he slipped out into the street feeling very conspicuous, but even more relieved. He swore he’d never visit the ignorant place again. But that night he had awakened ejaculating in a wet dream. Afterward he couldn’t be quite sure whether his hand mightn’t have helped and what sort of dream it had been otherwise, if any—certainly not one of his troll-haunted, buried- alive nightmares.

  No, they were gone forever, or at any rate for the next five months.

  And then when they did come back, against all his hopes, and when they continued on, and when he found himself balanced between the nightmares and Ultrabooth, and the days seemed dry as dust, there had come the welcome interruption of the Vanishing Lady.

  The first time Ryker had seen her, so far as he could recall, they’d been at opposite ends of the long, low entry hall, a good forty feet apart. He had been fumbling for his key outside the street door, which was thick oak framing a large glass panel backed by metal tracery. She’d been standing in profile before the gray elevator door, the small window of which was lit, indicating the cage was at this floor. His gaze approved her instantly (for some men life is an unceasing beauty contest); he liked the way her dark knee-length coat was belted in trimly and the neat look of her head, either dark hair drawn in rather closely or a cloche hat. Automatically he wondered whether she was young and slender or old and skinny.

  And then as he continued to look at her, key poised before the lock, she turned her head in his direction and his heart did little fillip and shiver. She looked at me, was what he felt, although the corridor was dimly lit and from this far away a face was little more than a pale oval with eye-smudges—and now her hair or hat made it a shadowed oval. It told you no more about her age than her profile had. Just the same, it was now turned toward him.

  All this happened quite swiftly.

  But then he had to look down at the lock in order to fit his key into it (a fussy business that seemed to take longer with each passing year) and turn it (he sometimes forgot which way) and shove the door open with his other hand, and by that time she’d moved out of sight.

  She couldn’t have taken the elevator up or down, he told himself as he strode the corridor a little more briskly than was his wont, for the small glass window in its door still shone brightly. She must have just drifted out of sight to the right, where the stairs were and the brass-fronted mailboxes and the window and door to the manager’s office and, past those, the long and short back corridors of the ground floor.

  But when he reached that foyer, it was empty and the manager’s window unoccupied, though not yet dark and shuttered for the night. She must have gone up the stairs or to a back apartment on this floor, though he’d heard no receding footsteps or shutting door confirm that theory.

  Just as he opened the elevator door he got the funniest hunch that he’d find her waiting for him there—that she’d entered the cage while he’d been unlocking the front door, but then not pushed a button for a floor. But the cage was as empty as the foyer. So much for hunches! He pushed the 14 button at the top of the narrow brass panel, and by the time he got there, he’d put the incident out of his mind, though a certain wistfulness clung to his general mood.

  And he probably would have forgotten it altogether except that late the next afternoon, when he was returning from a rather long walk, the same thing happened to him all over again, the whole incident repeating itself with only rather minor variations. For instance, this time her eyes seen barely to stray in his direction; there wasn’t the same sense of a full look. And something flashed faintly at her chest level, as if she were wearing jewelry of some sort, a gemmed pendant—or brooch more likely, since her coat was tightly shut. He was sure it was the same person, and there was the same sense of instant approval or attraction on his part, only stronger this time (which was natural enough, he told himself later). And he went down the hall faster this time and hurried on without pausing to check the stairs and the back corridor, though his chance of hearing footsteps or a clo
sing door was spoiled by the siren of an ambulance rushing by outside. Returning thoughtfully to the foyer, he found the cage gone, but it came down almost immediately, debarking a tenant he recognized—third or fourth floor, he thought—who said rather puzzledly in answer to a question by Ryker that he thought he’d summoned the elevator directly from One and it had been empty when it had reached his floor.

  Ryker thanked him and boarded the elevator.

  The cage’s silvered gray paper and polished fittings made it seem quite modern. Another nice touch was the little window in its door, which matched those in the floor doors when both were shut, so that you got a slow winking glimpse of each floor as you rose past—as Ryker now glimpsed the second floor go down. But actually it was an ancient vehicle smartened up, and so was the system that ran it. You had to hold down a button for an appreciable time to make the cage respond, because it worked by mechanical relays in the elevator room on the roof, not by the instant response to a touch of electronic modern systems. Also, it couldn’t remember several instructions and obey them in order as the modern ones could; it obeyed one order only and then waited to be given the next one manually.

  Ryker was very conscious of that difference between automatic and manual. For the past five years he had been shifting his own bodily activities from automatic to manual: running (hell, trotting was the most you could call it!—a clumping trot), going down stairs, climbing them, walking outside, even getting dressed and—almost—writing. Used to be he could switch on automatic for those and think about something else. But now he had to do more and more things a step at a time, and watching and thinking about each step too, like a baby learning (only you never did learn; it never got automatic again). And it took a lot more time, everything did. Sometimes you had to stand very still even to think.